For The Money
by Cyberwolf
Summary: Intergalactic bounty hunter Tenten is about to have a very bad day. Future!AU with aliens, spaceships, and many shiny things that go boom. WAS 'Should Have Stayed In Bed' - title changed. New chapter up, a much longer one with shiny things to play with!
1. For The Money

**AN: **A little more light-hearted than **Onyx After**, this series is inspired in equal part by reading **BlueGreenApples'** Cyberpunk!universe fics, specifically her awesome portrayal of Tenten as a and in "**Technopath"**, and by playing some **Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction** on the PS3. This isn't going to be very epic, or very deep, but I hope it'll be a fun little romp.

And it gives me the chance to outfit Tenten with (among other things) thermonuclear hand grenades, electrified energy whips, isokinetic energy cannons, and disco balls. And that's just the beginning!

* * *

"Hand me that hydro-spanner, will you?" came a disembodied voice from underneath a disorderly-looking heap of metallic parts that may have once been (but it would require quite the imagination to see it) a rocket-cyke. The lower body of what seemed to be a human female - save for the long, switch-topped tail wrapped around the waist - protruded from beneath in, laying on the faintly-glowing square surface of a repulsor-sled. A very grubby hand that was attached to an equally grubby arm appeared from the shadows of the disreputable heap of disassembled vehicle parts, palm open.

When no hydro-spanner smacked into the open palm as requested, the hand clenched into a fist, then joined the other in bracing against the edge of the main engine block, tensing, and pushing against it so the repulsor-sled she was laying on slid frictionlessly out from under the cyke.

The upper half of the body was thus revealed: a slim frame in a sleeveless black tunic that matched the color of the baggy, many-pocketed utility pants she was wearing. The clothes, made of self-repairing Xwi'i underarmor, woven from the silken filaments of monstrous spider-webs harvested (at great cost and danger) on the fifth and seventh moons of the planet Xwi'i, were as clean as the golden-toned skin was dirt-oil-and-other-messy-things-smeared, the faint striping characteristic of the Yongbax race invisible underneath.

A face equally smeared with the detritus of mechanical work was further maligned by an uncharacteristic scowl on the incongruously delicate features, over-sized, fuzzy rounded ears that had more than once been compared to Earth animals such as tigers, panthers and bears now pressed flat into her skull with irritation. Large dark eyes were fixed in an irritated glare at a green-and-black warbot floating nearby, observing a Cantillian flutterflie perched on its robotic finger.

"LEE!" she bellowed. "The HYDRO-SPANNER?!"

The warbot jumped, the sudden motion frightening off the shy little insect, as he warbled, "Aye, Tenten - I mean captain! Don't worry! I'll - ooof!" came the most undigital reply as the warbot tripped over a spare crate of ammunition. He toppled, windmilled his long arms, and then caught himself and somersaulted back to his feet in a feat of acrobatics most organics would not have thought robotics capable of.

Tenten watched him in mingled exasperation and affection. When she'd found the old-model warbot (no hover-pods, or rocket packs, or retractable wings, even) she'd initially thought to tear it apart and sell it for scrap metal. Having accidentally activated it, however, she soon found herself unwilling - perhaps even unable - to think of the gregarious robot as something so crass as potential credits. He'd become - overeager, unbearably happy, disgustingly cheerful and unrealistically idealistic thing he was -the closest thing to a friend Tenten had ever had. Although he was an old model, he'd never been activated before, and with nothing in his memory banks his approach to the universe was very like a young child's. She suspected that someone was testing a new AI system in him, because even with all its faults he was closer to true sentience than many advanced robots she'd seen. She'd never seen a warbot get DRUNK, for example.

His unit designation was **Rapid Operation Crusher/Killer: Law Enforcement Edition (R.O.C.K: L.E.E ) **which was the most ill-fitting name for a robot she'd ever seen. In that he always seemed to move much faster than he ought, and that he went into worried fits whenever she found the need to 'bend' certain laws and regulations, he fit his name. The rest of the time, he was the complete opposite - especially that ridiculous Crusher/Killer part. He was staunchly against unnecessary violence (though, for an older version warbot, he was quite capable of inflicting it if he found it necessary) which most people who knew Tenten found hilarious. He'd even refused Tenten's offers to retro-fit him with more advanced weaponry, stating he would stick to what he knew.

Exasperating thing, Tenten thought as she watched him jog back with a whole toolbox in his arms - but the thought was, as ever, tinged with real fondness.

"Finally," she sighed, grabbing the correct tool from the box Lee offered her, and reimmersing herself in the busy details of modifying a rocket-cyke with a tetra-thruster for that extra kick she needed when running from the Emperor's Taxmen. (A unit more feared than his Imperial Guard.)

* * *

Tenten was engaged in a very trying bit of crosswiring when a yell from Lee made her jump and bang her head on the underside of the cyke chassis. Rubbing her hand over her hair, cursing quietly in a particularly obscene patois of galactic trade-tongues that made up the speech of the pirates from the Nudac Asteroid Belt, she crawled out from under the cyke ready to do some damage. Lee, dancing impatiently in palce, saw this, and immeidately held up a large flatvid screen as if in protection.

"Message, Tenten!" he squeaked. "ALPHA-priority message for you on the comm-net!"

Tenten was sufficiently distracted by that news to forego throwing her trusty wrench at Lee's head, like she'd planned to. She pressed her hand against the cool transglass of the flatvid, letting the built-in biometrics system confirm her DNA pattern and release the high-priority message. An ALPHA-priority message? The encryption and security for those things was prohibitively expensive - most people said you were better off sending whatever you wanted to send by personal courier rather than an ALPHA message. She wondered who...

"Well, if it isn't my favorite bounty hunter," greeted a pale blonde Jayd'thi on the screen.

"Ino Yamanaka," Tenten replied in her flattest voice, tail-fur bristling and ears pressed flat against her head until they were almost hidden in her dark hair. "How'd you get this number?"

Ino waved a languid long-fingered hand. "Oh, here and there, darling - here and there. Let's not waste time on such trifles, all right?" She fixed Tenten with a suddenly intense gaze, pupil-less blue eyes like the lenses of a laser. "I've got a job for you."

Immediately Tenten felt her tail bristle even further. Ino Yamanaka was what could be loosely called a 'fixer' - though she, as ever, defied description and classification. She took jobs, gave them out to agents worthy of her trust, or did them herself; she gathered, stole, disseminated and made up information; she was the locus-point of a galaxy-wide web of informants, clients, agents and bounty hunters and if she didn't have a finger in the pie you were interested in, she certainly knew someone who did.

The Jayd'thi, like Tenten, were mostly humanoid in appearance, but their paler, ethereal beauty and their considerable psychic gifts made them seem more like the legends of Light Elves of that race's history. They even had pointed ears.

'And,' Tenten thought, as she gazed at Ino's platinum-and-ivory beauty on the screen, 'I always get very very nervous dealing with them.'

"Tell me, Yongbax," Ino purred, setting her pointed chin on her palm. "You ever heard of the Gladiatorial Fights?"


	2. For The Show

_"Tell me, Yongbax," Ino purred, setting her pointed chin on her palm. "You ever heard of the Gladiatorial Fights?"_

* * *

"The Imperial Fight Fest?" Tenten said in surprise, using one of the more common terms for the Imperial Gladiatorial Tournaments. There were many names for it: the Circus, the Rings, the Blood-dance. There were alien worlds with a thousand native tongues, and each tongue had a thousand names for the _sabong, _the 'fight of roosters' in one dialect and 'the songs' in another and both understood to mean the same thing_._

They _all _meant the same thing, of course: the endless rounds of tournaments and battles that the gladiators staged for the entertainment of the people, under the auspices of the Imperium; the biggest, baddest, most broadcast spectacle in the galaxy; the absolute focus of billions of lives, followed more fervently and by more people than could be claimed by any one of the myriad religions that the Empire was home to: not even the Holy Imperial Church, official state religion of the Imperium itself, nor the Star-worshippers of the Rashad system, nor the Jaddites of Sarantium could possibly compete with the gladiators for sheer attention-span. (And it was rumored that the Patriarch, the Star-father and the Pontifex - heads of the three largest religions in the galaxy - were themselves fans of the Battle-Circus.)

The Gladiatorials - _the_ Games - were an entity unto themselves.

"Of course I know about them," Tenten replied, eyes narrowing. "I've also heard of _breathing_ and _eating_ and _sleeping_. What kind of question is that?"

Ino laughed, a delicate sound like tiny silver bells fluttering in a spring breeze. This sound had presaged many of the more harrowing moments in Tenten's life and she realized she was gripping her OmniWrench 3000 so hard her knuckles were turning white.

"Then - would you be interested in competing in them?"

Tenten gaped at her for a moment. "Um, no, because I'm not interested in signing myself over to slavery?"

According to law, only a few - two hundred or so, the number fluctuating slightly according to Imperial whims - slave stables held the exclusive rights to train and provide the gladiators needed for the Games. It was a law jealously enforced - not only was it impossible to submit a gladiator for the Games without a proper accreditation from one of the slave-stables, but any operation purporting to be at all like the Games was brutally and swiftly shut down as soon as any stable heard about it. Something so small as a dirt-pit behind an unregistered bar on some borderworld might expect a swift reprisal. And everyone knew why - it was to establish _precedent_.

_No one_ but the stables got to supply gladiators.

The stables, obviously, had a vested interest in establishing their oligopoly. The enormous profit generated not only by the prizes awarded their gladiator-slaves (who had to turn everything over to their masters) but, moreso, by the huge and intricate betting going on at every level of the Games meant that they were _not keen_ at all on the idea of diluting their chances by introducing new fighters - worse, freelance fighters who were affiliated with no stable, who might not be leaned on to throw a fight.

The Imperium itself had an interest in making sure gladiators were a body made up exclusively of slaves. Gladiators could become enormously popular, and the ones who reached the top were also incredibly dangerous, probably able to kill the Emperor ten different ways if dropped a hundred yards from him, stark naked. It was a combination to give any government nervous twitch-fits. And so they enthusiastically supported the slave-stables in their drive to make sure gladiators remained a slaved class - the idea of a non-slave gladiator, someone without an instant-kill device of some sort permanently grafted onto their bodies, of a dangerous immensely influential super-warrior who was not instantly killable by fat rich males (or females, or hermaphroditic alien gender-categories) planets away with remote triggers - it was a horrible idea, to their way of thinking.

So - slave-gladiators. Slave stables with exclusive rights they enforced with great vigor, to the tune of 'send our private armies to decimate half a city three hundred parsecs from here'.

No, becoming a gladiator was not something Tenten had in mind. She explained this in deep detail and ringing disdain to Ino, and was just seguing into a lecture on the political considerations facing the top gladiators and why most of had AT LEAST THREE failsafe kill-bombs implanted in them when the Jayd'thi held up something that brought Tenten to wide-eyed silence.

"I never ask people to do something that's impossible for them to accomplish," she announced crisply. "Waste of everyone's time.Let's try this again: _If I gave you this imperial finding, with the imperial seal stamped in gold on it, _would you be interested in joining the Games?"

Stunned at the impossible document, staring - but with a cool, calculating corner of her mind weighing up the pros and cons before she spoke - Tenten nodded once, licked her lips, and replied. "I - I am interested."

* * *

**AN **

Short but with more to come, I swear. And hey! This is my 100th fic here! ...wooooooooow. What a long strange time it's been, fanfiction. net.


	3. To Get Ready

Around the middle of Year 4961, Standard Imperial Calendar, news of an extraordinary new gladiator began to swirl around the galactic perimeter. Quietly at first, whispered rumors and "Hey did you hear" (in various languages and forms of communication) around the water-dispenser. (Or the functional equivalent thereof, depending on planetary customs and species biology). That an extraordinary gladiator would be talked about was not rare. If a census could be accurately taken, the most common topic for conversations conducted in the Empire probably involved in some way or the other gladiators and their doings

But there were several things unusual about the news filtering out from Araneta, the planet where the Colosseum and the rest of the enormous infrastructure needed for the Games was located. (It was said that a great portion of the planet's economy depended simply on catering to the needs of the Games and the millions who came to be spectators. The quarterly reports submitted to the Imperial Revenue Service, most reviled of all Imperial departments, proved that it was true, and that without the Games, Araneta would most probably lapse into a feudal state of development within generations.)

For the first thing, the gladiator in question was only of Padati-rank. The gladiators were matched up against each other according to a rigorously-enforced hierarchy, and everyone, without exception, started off at Padati rank. Padati-ranked gladiators numbered in the thousands, tens of thousands, and fought the rawest battles in the galaxy. They were allowed no sort of modern weaponry or armor, only hand-crafted things made with natural and non-manufactured materials - leather and cloth and hand-forged metals (but that was rare) - hand-forged blades, clubs, and other melee weapons. They fought in torch-lit sandpits, not the vast, well-lit arenas of their higher-ranked brethren. And they died every hour, but no one really cared, because there would be a thousand more Padati-ranked fighters just drooling to have their chance in the pits.

Padati-ranked gladiators died quickly and easily, and there was no use getting excited about one until he had killed the requisite one hundred opponent gladiators and advanced to the rank of Rochus.

But this one - yes, they were whispering about her by the time she killed her fiftieth gladiator.

That in itself was already enough to indicate that _perhaps _this might be one of those who made it to Rochus. But she'd killed her fifty opponents - every one of them - in unbelievably short fights. Every single one, it was whispered, had been killed within seconds of the start of the battle, killed by throwing-daggers flung into vulnerable spots on the body. This had initially made her unpopular, in fact - such fights were boring and the audience was stunned and angered by the lack of spectacle. But victory is its own spectacle, no matter the way it was reached, and the sheer number and regularity of her wins compensated for the workmanlike way in which she achieved them. Still, they wondered - what stable would supply such non-crowd-pleasing slaves?

And that was the other peculiarity about her. Where was she _from? _The silver dragon twining about her left forearm was her stable-mark, and if looked up she was registered to the stable 'Silberdrache', but - what the hell_ was _Silberdrache? There were no other slaves from the stable, nor had they appeared in any records before the mysterious gladiator began her astronomical rise up the Padati ranks. She didn't even have a name...

"The gladiator from Silberdrache," they called her, and then just Silberdrache, and finally at the end "Drache."

And all the while her kill-count racked up, steadily, steadily, and unceasingly.

* * *

Deep within the barracks allocated to Silberdrache, Tenten finally allowed herself to relax. She collapsed into a free-floating lounger, its airgel-filled depths automatically adjusting to her size and weight. She let her head sink into the little roll-cushion that had formed underneath it and stre-eetched, finishing off by going completely limp. It had been a hard day, and it was only here she felt really safe on all of Araneta. She'd been sure to scan for bugs before coming in - the outside halls were lousy with surveillance devices both organic and tech-based, but a clever double-blind system shunted their attention to an android version of her currently 'sleeping' in the bedroom assigned to it. Her opponents were baffled by the fact that all this unfairly lethal gladiator seemed to do was sleep, eat (lightly) and go out to fight. It amused her to make them think so - moreover, they then underestimated her.

She shook her head, feeling the heavy-silk filaments brush against her bare back. She wore a head-covering made from the mane of an Srinnsri female, which gleamed in the dark, was a thousand different shades of silver that ranged from storm-cloud to mythril, shimmered like fish-scales - and covered her ears. She'd had it molecularly-bonded to her scalp, and had to shave her own brown hair short - and it was a wrench - but for the sake of disguise it had to be done. It would burn like acid to have it removed, and her ears - despite the long-term anesthesia she'd injected in it - would be cramped for weeks. But - she repeated to herself - it must be done.

_It must be done._ Sometimes she felt that this ought to be the one-sentence summation of her life. She wore her tail wrapped around her waist, like a sash. Sometimes she taped it down her leg. No one knew she had one. She'd made a small slit in her skin and spilled the dark-brown nanoworms she used for disguise. They were rare, and cost her a good amount of credits to obtain from the R&D nano-labs, but they were worth it. They crawled underneath her skin, turning its color into a deep, faintly metallic bronze that was better than any dye or tattoo, before dissolving into harmless plasma in her body. She'd injected gold tarass-ink directly into her eyes, and now the flat coin-bright surfaces glowed faintly in the dark and there was no hint of the former color - nor that she'd once had pupil, iris and corneal. She'd clipped her small claws, wore false teeth, and in all other ways made herself look quite different, and unrecognizable as a Yongbax. She hated it...

But because she must bear it, for the mission, she did so.

There was a buzzing in her ears - the bone-induction speakers she'd had installed in her skull were vibrating, alerting her to an incoming comm. She sighed, debated muting the whole system, but realized that to do so was stupid - she couldn't afford to turn down potential intelligence. Her eyes glazed slightly as she slipped into the viewing-mode for her implant - her mind was able to handle the really good thought-recognition wetware packages, but she liked to use other input sources as well, just for back-up and to keep in practice. She flicked her fingers, and an elaborate key-console made of light glimmered in the air - she brushed her fingers through and across it like a pianist of Earth Ancient coaxing music from their ebony-and-ivory instruments. She didn't trust herself to send visual or audio data right now, and text could be ciphered and scrambled half a hundred different ways in an instant. Not that she expected her comm-signals to be breached, but _just in case..._

There wasn't really any new intelligence, just an anxious Lee - she'd left him flying her pride and joy, the retrofitted warship _Soushoryuu_, and monitoring things from a safe position in Araneta's lower orbital ring. Her first order of business when arranging things was always, _always_, to have her get-away ride readied. She sent him a soothing text and reminding him to make sure the _Soushoryuu'_s engines were jump-ready, and then shut off the commlink.

Tomorrow she'd kill her hundredth gladiator. (There was no doubt in her head that she would) Then she would rise to Rochus. And from there on, gods be kind, to Ashva, then to Calvus, and finally Raja-rank. Once at Raja...

But those were thoughts for another day. She'd already laid in the plan, and she could go over it again once nearer to the actual event.

* * *

Drache went from strength to strength, rising through the ranks at the same insane speed. She got _better_, in fact, as the weapons-classes upgraded, taking time now to kill with flare and flash, fulfilling the class-challenges as if they were walks in the park. Her following now numbered in the tens of millions. Other stables had spent the same amount of credits - and killed unfortunate underlings - in a vain attempt to learn more about Silberdrache - both the stable and the gladiator that had taken the name. They hit dead walls at all counts, headed off by experience, intelligence, a Jayd'thi's psychic powers and - well, really, an utter lack of anything _to _find.

Half a standard Imperial year into her mission she was on the verge of reaching Raja-class, and the entire universe was watching. These included Ino, the Jayd'thi who had given her the mission to begin with, and the silent, shadowy figures who had contacted her in the first place.

"Are you pleased?" Ino murmured, as they all watched Tenten bounce around the Araneta Coliseum like a Janjayn simian high on uppers, twin vibroblades out and glowing with a thin veneer of energy-light. The crowd watching live at the Coliseum roared their approval as she landed behind the massive Bayn alien who was the last of the horde who had been ordered to kill her three days ago, which was the time this long endurance-battle had begun. There had been three hundred and fifty gladiators prepared to meet her, all armed according to Calvus-standards while she was given only a covering made of hand-tanned fur. They were dropped in the central plain of Araneta, far from civilization.

She'd slaughtered them all, and hunted the last one through the dark miles of Araneta's carefully conserved jungle back to the Coliseum, where he now bayed desperately for quarter even as she played with him - played like a predator who knew her prey was much below her level.

The crowd screamed for blood. She gathered herself and leapt.

"...very," came the low, smooth voice from the only chair in the room, voice intent as he watched the dark-and-silver Drache decapitate the Bayn with one cross-cutting slash of her twin blades (pilfered off her twenty-seventh kill and having served faithfully since then.)

"_Very_ pleased," he repeated, as Drache stood triumphant over her last enemy.

* * *

**Author's Notes**

* * *

Gladiator Ranks

Raja

Calvus

Ashva

Rochus

Padati

* * *

Thanks to BlueGreenApples, Toboe, and JudoCreature for prodding me along to finish this! Without them, seriously, this would have languished forever. I realize I am not so much a review whore as a discussion whore. Forgive me. (bows)

The gladiator rankings are based off old names for chess pieces.


End file.
